Against the Country (28 page)

Another dependent, Brown Dog (so stupid our father had decreed that she did not warrant a proper name), leapt in front of a Wonder Bread truck. Her usual method of curling up on a car roof and frying like an egg until she slid down and shook and barfed in the yard had been thwarted by our usual method of encasing her in a cold-water blanket, and tossing her into the back of the Dodge pickup, and driving her (with more laughter and radio, really, than concern) to the vet for an adrenaline shot. As regards the Wonder Bread attempt, we could scarcely believe that we had seen it, not because leaps in front of vehicles by Goochland’s animals were at all abnormal but because Wonder Bread trucks were such a rarity out there.

Surely they passed by often, with their lively dots, or maybe only this one did, so as to restock the shelves of all those unjust but colorful little country stores, yet we ourselves never saw one without pointing and shouting, as if it were a disorientated celebrity. I cannot say, then, at this remove, that I paid less attention to the truck than I did to the dog’s readying herself to jump in front of it, so as to bounce off the bumper’s bend
sinister and be ass-scooted across the gravel below our mailbox, after which we would fetch her up into the yard, and pet her velvet ears back, and pluck the shards from her lacerated haunches, and tell her what an entertaining idiot she had always been to us, all the while looking up and wondering after a turned town conveyance that had neither stopped nor thought to slow.

Fun story:

Irish
story:

Eventually our mother used that same car, the one our silliest bitch liked to scale and fry herself upon, to help an Irish setter die.

This dog came at us in a flash of Muppety orange from the right, and caromed off the grille, and landed absurdly far off to the left, grinningly dead, in what we correctly assumed to be its own yard. We braked and reversed and pulled up into the driveway and mounted the step and knocked, and as the screen door opened we pointed at the blood-matted corpse on the lawn and said how sorry we were, it came out of nowhere, and was there anything we could do, and the lady of the house said, “No,” and thanked us,
thanked
us, and we waddled faux somberly back to her driveway and headed home to what I remember now as a perfectly pleasant evening.

My brother drove us the rest of the way, to be sure, while his mother sat beside him, her seatbelt melodramatically fastened, and kept a moist eye out for any further life seeking to do damage to her car or to her afternoon. (Years later a big buck did it in, this car, and himself, with our vanishing father behind the wheel, but that is neither here nor there now, is it, the car or the buck or the father?) My sister and I sat in back and discussed the idea that the setter lady may have spotted all the paw prints on our hood and windshield and roof, and concluded that we
had put them there on purpose, each one representing yet another dog slaughtered for sport along those lawless roads. Was she polite, then, the setter lady, merely as a way of shooing us off before we had time and opportunity (and motive? had not our angry Jesus granted us at least that?) to run down and saint a second sweet puppy of hers?

Our mother fidgeted beneath her belt over the simple likelihood of this. Our brother stiffened adventurously against the wheel.

I might make a litany here of the higher self-death I heard about, or saw for myself, and in due time came naturally to encourage, since God’s plan is God’s plan, after all, and it is not every day, even in Goochland, that He gropes around in His trousers for a treat.

When that seventh grader diced his brains with a shotgun, believing he had just got his girlfriend pregnant, and we gathered in the cafeteria (to the east of our homerooms) and faced a small stage (to the north of our chairs) that had no architectural right to be there (and upon which I would later lose, or had already lost, a spelling bee), and heard from our teachers what a promising (because a “silent”) young man this had always been, and then heard them invoke the word “hero” (which I suppose he was, in the Hellenic sense, but still), I shut my eyes and tried to remember this champion but could conjure no more than his crisp polyester pantlegs, and those spotless if inexpensive shoes, and a desire to dodge his sharp toe on the playground, and an unbidden thrill at what violence he had done himself over so commonplace a seventh-grade worry.

When a friend’s mom, it was rumored (always
rumored
), opted for a similar exit strategy, and timed her departure well or poorly enough that her son was able to see her off (the door pushed open with a child’s innocent question; the loud and ruinous retort), I stared (without knowing, of course, and in no
real position to ask) into those newly widened eyes whenever they neared, and sought out in them the truth: not of what had occurred with the mother, per se, but the
actual
truth, the
final
one. Having failed to find it there, any more than I could spot it in my narrower globes as I bent toward the bathroom mirror and pinched at all those bumps on my forehead, half aware that one day my own skull might fill up with ugliness and, by a tool worse than fingernails, pop, I began to avoid him. Having sensed in my ogle an indication that I was not after anything like the truth here, but only a vulgar entertainment, he began to avoid me sooner.

When the father of that boobless child we had been to the beach with (or would that be later?) set his drink down, and walked out of a bar along Route 6, and stood in the road and waited (for minutes? for hours?) until a tractor-trailer hit him, and bounced his meat up ahead, and caught it up quickly and dragged it, they say for miles (but who was there watching?
who took these measurements?
), all the while air braking and trying not to jackknife across the road, I made every attempt to spot this stain from a passing car window but could find no real easement there. Had it rained in the interim and washed all the iniquity away? I had thought myself luckier when that taxidermist blew his stuffing out near our home and, although the scene was days since dealt with, I ran to it and believed for a moment I had located a puddle of the dead man’s blood, with some chunks of brain floating in it, though this turned out to be but rocks and clods dressed not in blood but in motor oil, which may very well have issued from the pan of an altogether different suicide.

When we drove to such sites (the crossroads where that van had met up with a maple, say, at eighty miles per, and had accordioned with all those drunken kids inside, only one of whom may have honestly wanted to die; that hill where a farmer we knew had “realized” that his brakes were out, and so had encouraged
his son to jump but had remained seated himself, and so had perished in flame and metal when his truck collided with the obligatory freight train below), we were not unaware that our treks involved their own potential risk and reward. All road travel in that place was attempted suicide, after all (or homicide, depending: our instructional manual,
Defensive Driving
, served each and either need), and one was not considered much of a driver unless one had been in a “tragic” crash. Beyond that, no “tragedy” was considered much unless someone had actually died in it, and no death was considered much unless the deceased had been (a) “cut in half” or (b) “burnt alive” or (c) both. There were but a few exceptions to this nomenclature amongst the living and the left-alive. “Vegetable” bought one a piquant and so an almost respectable glory, as did “most of his face is gone” and, of course, “wheelchair.”

When that paralyzed fellow, a graduate, I am guessing, of the high school, who retained his face but whose younger brother, a contemporary of ours, had seemed since the accident to have less of one, came to lecture us in the gym about the dangers of alcohol, and of arguing with one’s parents about the dangers of alcohol, and of imbibing more of the dangers of alcohol, and of climbing behind the wheel of a muscle car one’s parents had paid for in a misguided attempt to see one teetotaled out there, we scanned the stands above us, and sought out the shadow-face of the shy little brother, who laid back while the abstinence speech was under way, shifting only a little (in agitation? in hope?) when his precedent arrived at the God part, and said how grateful he was for the wreck, and the wounds, since without these he would never have been in a position (legs wrapped around his back, insensate toes pointed up at the welkin) to get off the dangers of alcohol and receive His love, which baffled a small but thinking minority out there (meaning me, mostly, but also, I prayed, the shy little brother), since why would a person praise the wheelchair for rolling him
toward Jesus but not the alcohol for rolling him toward the wheelchair? Then, bless or curse him, he reached back and praised the alcohol too.

When he finished the segment about how his penis still worked, having described to his satisfaction (and our rapt disgust) the process of intimate massage that allowed him, theoretically, to defy the constraints of his injury and procreate, all became crystalline. Up through then the lines of his argument had been too various, and one could not tell where, exactly, he sought to collect the acclaim he felt himself owed by a gymful of deliberately suicidal country Christians. (Or were we a gymful of deliberately Christian country suicides? I suppose it cannot matter now.) He seemed proud of it all, really: the alcohol, the anger, the car, the wreck, the rehab, the getting off the dangers of alcohol, the cursing of Jesus before and during this trial, the humble acceptance of Him ever after, the weirdo sex stuff, the insurance-bought van in which he now got around to his various “ministries” better than any of us did, thank you very much. Personally, I was no longer looking for clear-cut answers by the time he started in on the slide show but only for a sign that he had not lost his sense along with the sensation.

When the lights dimmed, and his voice rose a fifth in register as he began to click enthusiastically from frame to frame, lingering longer on the Afters than he did on the Befores (
A
: the crushed car, so like all those others we had hunched around in our denim to admire at whatever gas station was nearest the crash site; a puff-faced him in traction, his short mom hugging a too-tall surgeon; he trying to do that parallel-bars rehab thing while an enormously fat therapist screamed at him; he leaving the hospital in a wheelchair and giving a feeble thumbs-up; he proselytizing before a congregation (his?), backed by a robed and beaming choir; the arrival in his driveway, with balloons, of the insurance-bought van;
B
: he smiling out-of-doors with comely and half-dressed friends, a can of genuine Budweiser
beer in each hand; a half-empty (or was it a half-full?) bottle of Jack Daniel’s in the bucket seat, “ironically” strapped in; a recently washed and waxed muscle car, black (or was it dark blue?), our hero installed behind the wheel, waving goodbye out the window (barely visible within, passenger-seated, the cautiously elated face of the shy little brother!)), I saw that this cripple had indeed held on to his sanity, and I wondered whether any of the administrators on hand were in a position to realize, if only by our wild applause at the end, that this presentation they had intended for a warning was in fact a well-built and powerful recruiting tool, at least as effective as what the Army and the Marines would later muster.

When, ages after (though in truth it must have been but a matter of months), on my way to sell cigarettes and maxipads to Richmond’s West End, in what I recall (conveniently?) as a light rain, I found myself slowed by a state trooper and waved on past a wreck that reminded me, in a painterly sort of way, of a certain frame in that paralyzed young preacher’s slide presentation, improved upon here by the addition of what looked to be a tall man’s corpse thrown up high on the embankment and covered by a crisp white sheet just beginning to spot through now with blood, I found myself moved almost to tears. Not by what pain and fear this driver might have felt ere he died, nor by what would soon be felt among those who had thought that he belonged to them (and so thought that they belonged to him), but by the overwhelming sense of how
proper
death often looked against a country backdrop, and how perfectly beautiful its ugliness could usually contrive to be.

The line between death’s admiration and death’s desire thins considerably, or I suppose it may thicken, when one drives it at ninety miles per on a foothilly one-and-a-half-lane road, rising up out of mist for a weightless breath before diving down into it again, an unseatbelted sister beside one in the cab, screaming happily until she says, softly, “What the fuck is that?” and one sees, or thinks one sees (
does
one?), a faint flash of red (or was it only orange?) in the haze below, and so stomps on the brake, and then slides, and then spins, and then comes to a miraculous halt mere feet behind a car whose driver has decided to park on a foggy-bottom creek bridge so skinny one’s peers have dubbed it “the eye of the needle.” One gets out and walks back up the hill a little (why?) before turning and running down after the car (an old Continental, one insists it was) in a frenzy to
know
, or else physically to attack the knower, but stops short, as one’s vehicle just had, and retakes one’s place behind the wheel, and drives around and away from this fogmine (one’s sister spitting curses out her window), reflecting on the fact that upon stopping this murder-suicide had at least, unlike oneself, thought to switch on his hazard lights.

And so we have want of angels, those among us who wish to die, apparently, yet find ourselves unequal to the task. We have want of country-strong ones who will ride that gas pedal for us, and cut the brake line, and blow us straight to heaven.
Or else we have want of town-minded ones who will slow us down a smidge while they push that stalled Lincoln off into the creek bed below (or was it a Ford?) and convince us to take up Proust. Certainly we have want of higher beings who will help us decide whether we are country people at all or are only just pretending to be, under a hypnosis, self- or otherwise, and whether there exists a difference between these concepts large enough for us to consider it here. At minimum we have want of a passable excuse for the delay.